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The health benefits of learning a second language

Maria Christina Cuervo put her 10-year-old son Tomás in French immersion classes — but not just so he would learn to speak the language.

Cuervo knew that learning another language would not only open cultural and social doors for her son, a Grade 4 student at John Fisher Junior Public School in Toronto, but would also be healthy for his mind.

Maria Christina Cuervo is a Spanish and linguistics professor at the University of Toronto. She believes in the cognitive benefits of learning more than one language and sends her son Thomas to a French immersion school. (Rene Johnston Toronto Star / Toronto Star)

“If you speak two or more languages it trains your brain more,” said Cuervo, a Spanish and linguistics professor at the University of Toronto. “It’s like being more of an athlete.”

The “workout” happens when the brain has to juggle competing vocabularies. For example, an English and French speaker has to decide between saying “cat” or “chat” each time they see one.

“You are thinking of words or structures in two different languages, so you have to suppress one to speak in only one language,” Cuervo says. Doing this can strengthen the part of the brain that helps us process information and focus, she adds.

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Different research studies show that bilinguals are better decision makers, can experience a later onset of dementia, are more perceptive, or think differently.

Last year’s Oscar-winning movie Arrival tackled a version of that last idea — taking audiences on a quest with its star linguist (played by Amy Adams, whose character was informed by actual linguists such as McGill University’s Jessica Coon) to communicate with alien “heptapods.”

The film illustrates (while taking a bit of creative liberty) what scientists know as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis — a disputed theory that suggests that language can change the way we think and view the world around us.

This and other theories about the effect language has on a person’s mind are not universally agreed upon by researchers, some worry positive results indicated in lab tests don’t translate into noticeable changes in real life.

“The effort doesn’t match the goal,” said Stanka Fitneva, a psychology professor at Queen’s University who researches the connections between language, cognition and culture. While she agreed that learning a language is advantageous for one’s brain, she noted that it might not be the easiest route for those who are exclusively after the cognitive benefits it can offer. Less-demanding activities and games (for example, Simon Says) she said, could give the brain’s ‘executive function’ (the part Cuervo was talking about that help us plan and prioritize) a workout in a similar way.

Different research studies show that bilinguals are better decision makers, can experience a later onset of dementia and are more perceptive. (Rene Johnston Toronto Star)

Ellen Bialystok, a psychology professor at York University who is recognized among language and brain experts as one of the top researchers looking at the impact of bilingualism on the brain, says there are significant cognitive benefits (and aside from that, cultural and social ones) from learning a language.

But she thinks the biggest payoff emerges later in life.

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Bialystok pointed to a growing area of research, including some of her own, that has found people who speak more than one language can delay the onset of different types of dementia, including Alzheimer’s for several years.

“This is because the brain works differently, it uses different regions, it requires different amounts of energy,” she said. “It’s a more efficient brain.”

In one of her own studies published in Neurology, an American peer-reviewed journal, Bialystok along with two other researchers from Toronto’s Baycrest Health Sciences looked at more than 200 people with Alzheimer’s: about half were bilingual and half only spoke one language. The study found bilinguals experienced symptoms of the disease five years later and were diagnosed about four years later than their single language-speaking peers.

Bialystok said she believes adults and elderly people should consider learning a language, even if they have no plan to master it. It’s a process she describes as both difficult and stimulating and one she says has “all the right features for protecting brain health.”

Chandan Narayan, a linguistics professor at York University, said he’s cautious not to “overplay” the cognitive benefits of being bilingual, but still believes learning multiple languages is worthwhile.

“There is no doubt that being bilingual, in terms of a humanist perspective, makes us better citizens,” he said, noting that by speaking more than one language, people can make the world a smaller place by being able to communicate with more people. He thinks the social, cultural and cognitive impacts together make a strong case for one to learn more than one language.

Vocabulary size and bilingualism

There is research, including some done by York University’s Ellen Bialystok, which has found that children who speak multiple languages have smaller vocabularies in each language than those who speak just one.

In one paper published by Cambridge University Press, Bialystok looked at vocabulary tests completed by almost a thousand children between the ages of 5 and 9 years old, half bilingual and half monolingual, monolinguals scored an average 105 compared to 95 of bilinguals. In a later study, Bialystok and three other researchers looked at more than 1,700 children between ages 3 and 10 and found, again, that those who were bilingual had smaller vocabularies than kids who spoke a single language.

“There is evidence on all kinds of linguistic processing tasks — how rapidly you can retrieve words, what’s your vocabulary size, how quickly can you process sentences — in all of those ways bilinguals are slower,” Bialystok said. “It’s a reliable finding and you could say if we want to call the other things advantages you’d have to call this a disadvantage, but I don’t think it has much consequence.”

While several language and brain experts interviewed by the Star acknowledged similar findings with regards to the vocabularies of children who learn multiple languages, none advised against it.

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